Which EC2 AWS CLI tools should I be using?

Question

Amazon seems to have multiple tools that to do the same thing to manage EC2; see below:

• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ec2/index.html (Python version)
• http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/CommandLineReference/set-up-ec2-cli-linux.html (Java version)

Which ones should I be using? They both seem to be maintained by Amazon.

Answer 1

The Python tools are a newer, unified replacement for all the old service-specific command line tools. For example the java tool you linked to only supports the EC2 service, while the Python tools support all AWS services.